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Title: The World Set Free
A Story of Mankind
Author: Herbert George Wells
Release Date: October, 1997 [eBook #1059]
[Most recently updated: March 6, 2021]
Language: English
Character set encoding: UTF-8
Produced by: Charles Keller and David Widger
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE WORLD SET FREE
***
The World Set Free
by H.G. Wells
We Are All Things That Make And Pass,
Striving Upon A Hidden Mission,
Out To The Open Sea.
TO
Frederick Soddy’s
‘Interpretation Of Radium’
This Story,
Which Owes Long Passages
To The Eleventh Chapter Of That Book,
Acknowledges And Inscribes Itself
Contents
PREFACE
PRELUDE. THE SUN SNARERS
CHAPTER THE FIRST. THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
CHAPTER THE SECOND. THE LAST WAR
CHAPTER THE THIRD. THE ENDING OF WAR
CHAPTER THE FOURTH. THE NEW PHASE
CHAPTER THE FIFTH. THE LAST DAYS OF MARCUS KARENIN
PREFACE
The World Set Free was written in 1913 and published early in 1914, and it is the
latest of a series of three fantasias of possibility, stories which all turn on the possible
developments in the future of some contemporary force or group of forces. The World
Set Free was written under the immediate shadow of the Great War. Every intelligent
person in the world felt that disaster was impending and knew no way of averting it, but
few of us realised in the earlier half of 1914 how near the crash was to us. The reader will
be amused to find that here it is put off until the year 1956. He may naturally want to
know the reason for what will seem now a quite extraordinary delay. As a prophet, the
author must confess he has always been inclined to be rather a slow prophet. The war
aeroplane in the world of reality, for example, beat the forecast in Anticipations by about
twenty years or so. I suppose a desire not to shock the sceptical reader’s sense of use
and wont and perhaps a less creditable disposition to hedge, have something to do with
this dating forward of one’s main events, but in the particular case of The World Set Free
there was, I think, another motive in holding the Great War back, and that was to allow
the chemist to get well forward with his discovery of the release of atomic energy. 1956
—or for that matter 2056—may be none too late for that crowning revolution in human
potentialities. And apart from this procrastination of over forty years, the guess at the
opening phase of the war was fairly lucky; the forecast of an alliance of the Central
Empires, the opening campaign through the Netherlands, and the despatch of the British
Expeditionary Force were all justified before the book had been published six months.
And the opening section of Chapter the Second remains now, after the reality has
happened, a fairly adequate diagnosis of the essentials of the matter. One happy hit (in
Chapter the Second, Section 2), on which the writer may congratulate himself, is the
forecast that under modern conditions it would be quite impossible for any great general
to emerge to supremacy and concentrate the enthusiasm of the armies of either side.
There could be no Alexanders or Napoleons. And we soon heard the scientific corps
muttering, ‘These old fools,’ exactly as it is here foretold.
These, however, are small details, and the misses in the story far outnumber the hits. It
is the main thesis which is still of interest now; the thesis that because of the development
of scientific knowledge, separate sovereign states and separate sovereign empires are no
longer possible in the world, that to attempt to keep on with the old system is to heap
disaster upon disaster for mankind and perhaps to destroy our race altogether. The
remaining interest of this book now is the sustained validity of this thesis and the
discussion of the possible ending of war on the earth. I have supposed a sort of epidemic
of sanity to break out among the rulers of states and the leaders of mankind. I have
represented the native common sense of the French mind and of the English mind—for
manifestly King Egbert is meant to be ‘God’s Englishman’—leading mankind towards a
bold and resolute effort of salvage and reconstruction. Instead of which, as the school
book footnotes say, compare to-day’s newspaper. Instead of a frank and honourable
gathering of leading men, Englishman meeting German and Frenchman Russian, brothers
in their offences and in their disaster, upon the hills of Brissago, beheld in Geneva at the
other end of Switzerland a poor little League of (Allied) Nations (excluding the United
States, Russia, and most of the ‘subject peoples’ of the world), meeting obscurely amidst
a world-wide disregard to make impotent gestures at the leading problems of the
debacle. Either the disaster has not been vast enough yet or it has not been swift enough
to inflict the necessary moral shock and achieve the necessary moral revulsion. Just as the
world of 1913 was used to an increasing prosperity and thought that increase would go
on for ever, so now it would seem the world is growing accustomed to a steady glide
towards social disintegration, and thinks that that too can go on continually and never
come to a final bump. So soon do use and wont establish themselves, and the most
flaming and thunderous of lessons pale into disregard.
The question whether a Leblanc is still possible, the question whether it is still possible
to bring about an outbreak of creative sanity in mankind, to avert this steady glide to
destruction, is now one of the most urgent in the world. It is clear that the writer is
temperamentally disposed to hope that there is such a possibility. But he has to confess
that he sees few signs of any such breadth of understanding and steadfastness of will as an
effectual effort to turn the rush of human affairs demands. The inertia of dead ideas and
old institutions carries us on towards the rapids. Only in one direction is there any plain
recognition of the idea of a human commonweal as something overriding any national and
patriotic consideration, and that is in the working class movement throughout the world.
And labour internationalism is closely bound up with conceptions of a profound social
revolution. If world peace is to be attained through labour internationalism, it will have to
be attained at the price of the completest social and economic reconstruction and by
passing through a phase of revolution that will certainly be violent, that may be very
bloody, which may be prolonged through a long period, and may in the end fail to achieve
anything but social destruction. Nevertheless, the fact remains that it is in the labour class,
and the labour class alone, that any conception of a world rule and a world peace has so
far appeared. The dream of The World Set Free, a dream of highly educated and highly
favoured leading and ruling men, voluntarily setting themselves to the task of reshaping the
world, has thus far remained a dream.
H. G. WELLS.
EASTON GLEBE, DUNMOW, 1921.
PRELUDE
THE SUN SNARERS
Section I
The history of mankind is the history of the attainment of external power. Man is the
tool-using, fire-making animal. From the outset of his terrestrial career we find him
supplementing the natural strength and bodily weapons of a beast by the heat of burning
and the rough implement of stone. So he passed beyond the ape. From that he expands.
Presently he added to himself the power of the horse and the ox, he borrowed the
carrying strength of water and the driving force of the wind, he quickened his fire by
blowing, and his simple tools, pointed first with copper and then with iron, increased and
varied and became more elaborate and efficient. He sheltered his heat in houses and
made his way easier by paths and roads. He complicated his social relationships and
increased his efficiency by the division of labour. He began to store up knowledge.
Contrivance followed contrivance, each making it possible for a man to do more. Always
down the lengthening record, save for a set-back ever and again, he is doing more.... A
quarter of a million years ago the utmost man was a savage, a being scarcely articulate,
sheltering in holes in the rocks, armed with a rough-hewn flint or a fire-pointed stick,
naked, living in small family groups, killed by some younger man so soon as his first virile
activity declined. Over most of the great wildernesses of earth you would have sought him
in vain; only in a few temperate and sub-tropical river valleys would you have found the
squatting lairs of his little herds, a male, a few females, a child or so.
He knew no future then, no kind of life except the life he led. He fled the cave-bear
over the rocks full of iron ore and the promise of sword and spear; he froze to death
upon a ledge of coal; he drank water muddy with the clay that would one day make cups
of porcelain; he chewed the ear of wild wheat he had plucked and gazed with a dim
speculation in his eyes at the birds that soared beyond his reach. Or suddenly he became
aware of the scent of another male and rose up roaring, his roars the formless precursors
of moral admonitions. For he was a great individualist, that original, he suffered none
other than himself.
So through the long generations, this heavy precursor, this ancestor of all of us, fought
and bred and perished, changing almost imperceptibly.
Yet he changed. That keen chisel of necessity which sharpened the tiger’s claw age by
age and fined down the clumsy Orchippus to the swift grace of the horse, was at work
upon him—is at work upon him still. The clumsier and more stupidly fierce among him
were killed soonest and oftenest; the finer hand, the quicker eye, the bigger brain, the
better balanced body prevailed; age by age, the implements were a little better made, the
man a little more delicately adjusted to his possibilities. He became more social; his herd
grew larger; no longer did each man kill or drive out his growing sons; a system of taboos
made them tolerable to him, and they revered him alive and soon even after he was dead,
and were his allies against the beasts and the rest of mankind. (But they were forbidden to
touch the women of the tribe, they had to go out and capture women for themselves, and
each son fled from his stepmother and hid from her lest the anger of the Old Man should
be roused. All the world over, even to this day, these ancient inevitable taboos can be
traced.) And now instead of caves came huts and hovels, and the fire was better tended
and there were wrappings and garments; and so aided, the creature spread into colder
climates, carrying food with him, storing food—until sometimes the neglected grass-seed
sprouted again and gave a first hint of agriculture.
And already there were the beginnings of leisure and thought.
Man began to think. There were times when he was fed, when his lusts and his fears
were all appeased, when the sun shone upon the squatting-place and dim stirrings of
speculation lit his eyes. He scratched upon a bone and found resemblance and pursued it
and began pictorial art, moulded the soft, warm clay of the river brink between his fingers,
and found a pleasure in its patternings and repetitions, shaped it into the form of vessels,
and found that it would hold water. He watched the streaming river, and wondered from
what bountiful breast this incessant water came; he blinked at the sun and dreamt that
perhaps he might snare it and spear it as it went down to its resting-place amidst the
distant hills. Then he was roused to convey to his brother that once indeed he had done
so—at least that some one had done so—he mixed that perhaps with another dream
almost as daring, that one day a mammoth had been beset; and therewith began fiction—
pointing a way to achievement—and the august prophetic procession of tales.
For scores and hundreds of centuries, for myriads of generations that life of our fathers
went on. From the beginning to the ripening of that phase of human life, from the first
clumsy eolith of rudely chipped flint to the first implements of polished stone, was two or
three thousand centuries, ten or fifteen thousand generations. So slowly, by human
standards, did humanity gather itself together out of the dim intimations of the beast. And
that first glimmering of speculation, that first story of achievement, that story-teller bright-
eyed and flushed under his matted hair, gesticulating to his gaping, incredulous listener,
gripping his wrist to keep him attentive, was the most marvellous beginning this world has
ever seen. It doomed the mammoths, and it began the setting of that snare that shall catch
the sun.
Section 2
That dream was but a moment in a man’s life, whose proper business it seemed was to
get food and kill his fellows and beget after the manner of all that belongs to the fellowship
of the beasts. About him, hidden from him by the thinnest of veils, were the untouched
sources of Power, whose magnitude we scarcely do more than suspect even to-day,
Power that could make his every conceivable dream come real. But the feet of the race
were in the way of it, though he died blindly unknowing.
At last, in the generous levels of warm river valleys, where food is abundant and life
very easy, the emerging human overcoming his earlier jealousies, becoming, as necessity
persecuted him less urgently, more social and tolerant and amenable, achieved a larger
community. There began a division of labour, certain of the older men specialised in
knowledge and direction, a strong man took the fatherly leadership in war, and priest and
king began to develop their rôles in the opening drama of man’s history. The priest’s
solicitude was seed-time and harvest and fertility, and the king ruled peace and war. In a
hundred river valleys about the warm, temperate zone of the earth there were already
towns and temples, a score of thousand years ago. They flourished unrecorded, ignoring
the past and unsuspicious of the future, for as yet writing had still to begin.
Very slowly did man increase his demand upon the illimitable wealth of Power that
offered itself on every hand to him. He tamed certain animals, he developed his
primordially haphazard agriculture into a ritual, he added first one metal to his resources
and then another, until he had copper and tin and iron and lead and gold and silver to
supplement his stone, he hewed and carved wood, made pottery, paddled down his river
until he came to the sea, discovered the wheel and made the first roads. But his chief
activity for a hundred centuries and more, was the subjugation of himself and others to
larger and larger societies. The history of man is not simply the conquest of external
power; it is first the conquest of those distrusts and fiercenesses, that self-concentration
and intensity of animalism, that tie his hands from taking his inheritance. The ape in us still
resents association. From the dawn of the age of polished stone to the achievement of the
Peace of the World, man’s dealings were chiefly with himself and his fellow man, trading,
bargaining, law-making, propitiating, enslaving, conquering, exterminating, and every little
increment in Power, he turned at once and always turns to the purposes of this confused
elaborate struggle to socialise. To incorporate and comprehend his fellow men into a
community of purpose became the last and greatest of his instincts. Already before the
last polished phase of the stone age was over he had become a political animal. He made
astonishingly far-reaching discoveries within himself, first of counting and then of writing
and making records, and with that his town communities began to stretch out to dominion;
in the valleys of the Nile, the Euphrates, and the great Chinese rivers, the first empires and
the first written laws had their beginnings. Men specialised for fighting and rule as soldiers
and knights. Later, as ships grew seaworthy, the Mediterranean which had been a barrier
became a highway, and at last out of a tangle of pirate polities came the great struggle of
Carthage and Rome. The history of Europe is the history of the victory and breaking up
of the Roman Empire. Every ascendant monarch in Europe up to the last, aped Cæsar
and called himself Kaiser or Tsar or Imperator or Kasir-i-Hind. Measured by the
duration of human life it is a vast space of time between that first dynasty in Egypt and the
coming of the aeroplane, but by the scale that looks back to the makers of the eoliths, it is
all of it a story of yesterday.
Now during this period of two hundred centuries or more, this period of the warring
states, while men’s minds were chiefly preoccupied by politics and mutual aggression,
their progress in the acquirement of external Power was slow—rapid in comparison with
the progress of the old stone age, but slow in comparison with this new age of systematic
discovery in which we live. They did not very greatly alter the weapons and tactics of
warfare, the methods of agriculture, seamanship, their knowledge of the habitable globe,
or the devices and utensils of domestic life between the days of the early Egyptians and
the days when Christopher Columbus was a child. Of course, there were inventions and
changes, but there were also retrogressions; things were found out and then forgotten
again; it was, on the whole, a progress, but it contained no steps; the peasant life was the
same, there were already priests and lawyers and town craftsmen and territorial lords and
rulers, doctors, wise women, soldiers and sailors in Egypt and China and Assyria and
south-eastern Europe at the beginning of that period, and they were doing much the same
things and living much the same life as they were in Europe in A.D. 1500. The English
excavators of the year A.D. 1900 could delve into the remains of Babylon and Egypt and
disinter legal documents, domestic accounts, and family correspondence that they could
read with the completest sympathy. There were great religious and moral changes
throughout the period, empires and republics replaced one another, Italy tried a vast
experiment in slavery, and indeed slavery was tried again and again and failed and failed
and was still to be tested again and rejected again in the New World; Christianity and
Mohammedanism swept away a thousand more specialised cults, but essentially these
were progressive adaptations of mankind to material conditions that must have seemed
fixed for ever. The idea of revolutionary changes in the material conditions of life would
have been entirely strange to human thought through all that time.
Yet the dreamer, the story-teller, was there still, waiting for his opportunity amidst the
busy preoccupations, the comings and goings, the wars and processions, the castle
building and cathedral building, the arts and loves, the small diplomacies and incurable
feuds, the crusades and trading journeys of the middle ages. He no longer speculated with
the untrammelled freedom of the stone-age savage; authoritative explanations of
everything barred his path; but he speculated with a better brain, sat idle and gazed at
circling stars in the sky and mused upon the coin and crystal in his hand. Whenever there
was a certain leisure for thought throughout these times, then men were to be found
dissatisfied with the appearances of things, dissatisfied with the assurances of orthodox
belief, uneasy with a sense of unread symbols in the world about them, questioning the
finality of scholastic wisdom. Through all the ages of history there were men to whom this
whisper had come of hidden things about them. They could no longer lead ordinary lives
nor content themselves with the common things of this world once they had heard this
voice. And mostly they believed not only that all this world was as it were a painted
curtain before things unguessed at, but that these secrets were Power. Hitherto Power
had come to men by chance, but now there were these seekers seeking, seeking among
rare and curious and perplexing objects, sometimes finding some odd utilisable thing,
sometimes deceiving themselves with fancied discovery, sometimes pretending to find.
The world of every day laughed at these eccentric beings, or found them annoying and ill-
treated them, or was seized with fear and made saints and sorcerers and warlocks of
them, or with covetousness and entertained them hopefully; but for the greater part
heeded them not at all. Yet they were of the blood of him who had first dreamt of
attacking the mammoth; every one of them was of his blood and descent; and the thing
they sought, all unwittingly, was the snare that will some day catch the sun.
Section 3
Such a man was that Leonardo da Vinci, who went about the court of Sforza in Milan
in a state of dignified abstraction. His common-place books are full of prophetic subtlety
and ingenious anticipations of the methods of the early aviators. Dürer was his parallel and
Roger Bacon—whom the Franciscans silenced—of his kindred. Such a man again in an
earlier city was Hero of Alexandria, who knew of the power of steam nineteen hundred
years before it was first brought into use. And earlier still was Archimedes of Syracuse,
and still earlier the legendary Daedalus of Cnossos. All up and down the record of history
whenever there was a little leisure from war and brutality the seekers appeared. And half
the alchemists were of their tribe.
When Roger Bacon blew up his first batch of gunpowder one might have supposed
that men would have gone at once to the explosive engine. But they could see nothing of
the sort. They were not yet beginning to think of seeing things; their metallurgy was all too
poor to make such engines even had they thought of them. For a time they could not
make instruments sound enough to stand this new force even for so rough a purpose as
hurling a missile. Their first guns had barrels of coopered timber, and the world waited for
more than five hundred years before the explosive engine came.
Even when the seekers found, it was at first a long journey before the world could use
their findings for any but the roughest, most obvious purposes. If man in general was not
still as absolutely blind to the unconquered energies about him as his paleolithic precursor,
he was at best purblind.
Section 4
The latent energy of coal and the power of steam waited long on the verge of
discovery, before they began to influence human lives.
There were no doubt many such devices as Hero’s toys devised and forgotten, time
after time, in courts and palaces, but it needed that coal should be mined and burning with
plenty of iron at hand before it dawned upon men that here was something more than a
curiosity. And it is to be remarked that the first recorded suggestion for the use of steam
was in war; there is an Elizabethan pamphlet in which it is proposed to fire shot out of
corked iron bottles full of heated water. The mining of coal for fuel, the smelting of iron
upon a larger scale than men had ever done before, the steam pumping engine, the steam-
engine and the steam-boat, followed one another in an order that had a kind of logical
necessity. It is the most interesting and instructive chapter in the history of the human
intelligence, the history of steam from its beginning as a fact in human consciousness to the
perfection of the great turbine engines that preceded the utilisation of intra-molecular
power. Nearly every human being must have seen steam, seen it incuriously for many
thousands of years; the women in particular were always heating water, boiling it, seeing it
boil away, seeing the lids of vessels dance with its fury; millions of people at different
times must have watched steam pitching rocks out of volcanoes like cricket balls and
blowing pumice into foam, and yet you may search the whole human record through,
letters, books, inscriptions, pictures, for any glimmer of a realisation that here was force,
here was strength to borrow and use.... Then suddenly man woke up to it, the railways
spread like a network over the globe, the ever enlarging iron steamships began their
staggering fight against wind and wave.
Steam was the first-comer in the new powers, it was the beginning of the Age of
Energy that was to close the long history of the Warring States.
But for a long time men did not realise the importance of this novelty. They would not
recognise, they were not able to recognise that anything fundamental had happened to
their immemorial necessities. They called the steam-engine the ‘iron horse’ and pretended
that they had made the most partial of substitutions. Steam machinery and factory
production were visibly revolutionising the conditions of industrial production, population
was streaming steadily in from the country-side and concentrating in hitherto unthought-of
masses about a few city centres, food was coming to them over enormous distances upon
a scale that made the one sole precedent, the corn ships of imperial Rome, a petty
incident; and a huge migration of peoples between Europe and Western Asia and
America was in Progress, and—nobody seems to have realised that something new had
come into human life, a strange swirl different altogether from any previous circling and
mutation, a swirl like the swirl when at last the lock gates begin to open after a long phase
of accumulating water and eddying inactivity....
The sober Englishman at the close of the nineteenth century could sit at his breakfast-
table, decide between tea from Ceylon or coffee from Brazil, devour an egg from France
with some Danish ham, or eat a New Zealand chop, wind up his breakfast with a West
Indian banana, glance at the latest telegrams from all the world, scrutinise the prices
current of his geographically distributed investments in South Africa, Japan, and Egypt,
and tell the two children he had begotten (in the place of his father’s eight) that he thought
the world changed very little. They must play cricket, keep their hair cut, go to the old
school he had gone to, shirk the lessons he had shirked, learn a few scraps of Horace and
Virgil and Homer for the confusion of cads, and all would be well with them....
Section 5
Electricity, though it was perhaps the earlier of the two to be studied, invaded the
common life of men a few decades after the exploitation of steam. To electricity also, in
spite of its provocative nearness all about him, mankind had been utterly blind for
incalculable ages. Could anything be more emphatic than the appeal of electricity for
attention? It thundered at man’s ears, it signalled to him in blinding flashes, occasionally it
killed him, and he could not see it as a thing that concerned him enough to merit study. It
came into the house with the cat on any dry day and crackled insinuatingly whenever he
stroked her fur. It rotted his metals when he put them together.... There is no single
record that any one questioned why the cat’s fur crackles or why hair is so unruly to
brush on a frosty day, before the sixteenth century. For endless years man seems to have
done his very successful best not to think about it at all; until this new spirit of the Seeker
turned itself to these things.
How often things must have been seen and dismissed as unimportant, before the
speculative eye and the moment of vision came! It was Gilbert, Queen Elizabeth’s court
physician, who first puzzled his brains with rubbed amber and bits of glass and silk and
shellac, and so began the quickening of the human mind to the existence of this universal
presence. And even then the science of electricity remained a mere little group of curious
facts for nearly two hundred years, connected perhaps with magnetism—a mere guess
that—perhaps with the lightning. Frogs’ legs must have hung by copper hooks from iron
railings and twitched upon countless occasions before Galvani saw them. Except for the
lightning conductor, it was 250 years after Gilbert before electricity stepped out of the
cabinet of scientific curiosities into the life of the common man.... Then suddenly, in the
half-century between 1880 and 1930, it ousted the steam-engine and took over traction,
it ousted every other form of household heating, abolished distance with the perfected
wireless telephone and the telephotograph....
Section 6
And there was an extraordinary mental resistance to discovery and invention for at
least a hundred years after the scientific revolution had begun. Each new thing made its
way into practice against a scepticism that amounted at times to hostility. One writer upon
these subjects gives a funny little domestic conversation that happened, he says, in the
year 1898, within ten years, that is to say, of the time when the first aviators were fairly on
the wing. He tells us how he sat at his desk in his study and conversed with his little boy.
His little boy was in profound trouble. He felt he had to speak very seriously to his
father, and as he was a kindly little boy he did not want to do it too harshly.
This is what happened.
‘I wish, Daddy,’ he said, coming to his point, ‘that you wouldn’t write all this stuff
about flying. The chaps rot me.’
‘Yes!’ said his father.
‘And old Broomie, the Head I mean, he rots me. Everybody rots me.’
‘But there is going to be flying—quite soon.’
The little boy was too well bred to say what he thought of that. ‘Anyhow,’ he said, ‘I
wish you wouldn’t write about it.’
‘You’ll fly—lots of times—before you die,’ the father assured him.
The little boy looked unhappy.
The father hesitated. Then he opened a drawer and took out a blurred and under-
developed photograph. ‘Come and look at this,’ he said.
The little boy came round to him. The photograph showed a stream and a meadow
beyond, and some trees, and in the air a black, pencil-like object with flat wings on either
side of it. It was the first record of the first apparatus heavier than air that ever maintained
itself in the air by mechanical force. Across the margin was written: ‘Here we go up, up,
up—from S. P. Langley, Smithsonian Institution, Washington.’
The father watched the effect of this reassuring document upon his son. ‘Well?’ he
said.
‘That,’ said the schoolboy, after reflection, ‘is only a model.’
‘Model to-day, man to-morrow.’
The boy seemed divided in his allegiance. Then he decided for what he believed quite
firmly to be omniscience. ‘But old Broomie,’ he said, ‘he told all the boys in his class only
yesterday, “no man will ever fly.” No one, he says, who has ever shot grouse or
pheasants on the wing would ever believe anything of the sort....’
Yet that boy lived to fly across the Atlantic and edit his father’s reminiscences.
Section 7
At the close of the nineteenth century as a multitude of passages in the literature of that
time witness, it was thought that the fact that man had at last had successful and profitable
dealings with the steam that scalded him and the electricity that flashed and banged about
the sky at him, was an amazing and perhaps a culminating exercise of his intelligence and
his intellectual courage. The air of ‘Nunc Dimittis’ sounds in same of these writings. ‘The
great things are discovered,’ wrote Gerald Brown in his summary of the nineteenth
century. ‘For us there remains little but the working out of detail.’ The spirit of the seeker
was still rare in the world; education was unskilled, unstimulating, scholarly, and but little
valued, and few people even then could have realised that Science was still but the
flimsiest of trial sketches and discovery scarcely beginning. No one seems to have been
afraid of science and its possibilities. Yet now where there had been but a score or so of
seekers, there were many thousands, and for one needle of speculation that had been
probing the curtain of appearances in 1800, there were now hundreds. And already
Chemistry, which had been content with her atoms and molecules for the better part of a
century, was preparing herself for that vast next stride that was to revolutionise the whole
life of man from top to bottom.
One realises how crude was the science of that time when one considers the case of
the composition of air. This was determined by that strange genius and recluse, that man
of mystery, that disembowelled intelligence, Henry Cavendish, towards the end of the
eighteenth century. So far as he was concerned the work was admirably done. He
separated all the known ingredients of the air with a precision altogether remarkable; he
even put it upon record that he had some doubt about the purity of the nitrogen. For more
than a hundred years his determination was repeated by chemists all the world over, his
apparatus was treasured in London, he became, as they used to say, ‘classic,’ and
always, at every one of the innumerable repetitions of his experiment, that sly element
argon was hiding among the nitrogen (and with a little helium and traces of other
substances, and indeed all the hints that might have led to the new departures of the
twentieth-century chemistry), and every time it slipped unobserved through the
professorial fingers that repeated his procedure.
Is it any wonder then with this margin of inaccuracy, that up to the very dawn of the
twentieth-century scientific discovery was still rather a procession of happy accidents than
an orderly conquest of nature?
Yet the spirit of seeking was spreading steadily through the world. Even the
schoolmaster could not check it. For the mere handful who grew up to feel wonder and
curiosity about the secrets of nature in the nineteenth century, there were now, at the
beginning of the twentieth, myriads escaping from the limitations of intellectual routine and
the habitual life, in Europe, in America, North and South, in Japan, in China, and all about
the world.
It was in 1910 that the parents of young Holsten, who was to be called by a whole
generation of scientific men, ‘the greatest of European chemists,’ were staying in a villa
near Santo Domenico, between Fiesole and Florence. He was then only fifteen, but he
was already distinguished as a mathematician and possessed by a savage appetite to
understand. He had been particularly attracted by the mystery of phosphorescence and its
apparent unrelatedness to every other source of light. He was to tell afterwards in his
reminiscences how he watched the fireflies drifting and glowing among the dark trees in
the garden of the villa under the warm blue night sky of Italy; how he caught and kept
them in cages, dissected them, first studying the general anatomy of insects very
elaborately, and how he began to experiment with the effect of various gases and varying
temperature upon their light. Then the chance present of a little scientific toy invented by
Sir William Crookes, a toy called the spinthariscope, on which radium particles impinge
upon sulphide of zinc and make it luminous, induced him to associate the two sets of
phenomena. It was a happy association for his inquiries. It was a rare and fortunate thing,
too, that any one with the mathematical gift should have been taken by these curiosities.
Section 8
And while the boy Holsten was mooning over his fireflies at Fiesole, a certain professor
of physics named Rufus was giving a course of afternoon lectures upon Radium and
Radio-Activity in Edinburgh. They were lectures that had attracted a very considerable
amount of attention. He gave them in a small lecture-theatre that had become more and
more congested as his course proceeded. At his concluding discussion it was crowded
right up to the ceiling at the back, and there people were standing, standing without any
sense of fatigue, so fascinating did they find his suggestions. One youngster in particular, a
chuckle-headed, scrub-haired lad from the Highlands, sat hugging his knee with great
sand-red hands and drinking in every word, eyes aglow, cheeks flushed, and ears
burning.
‘And so,’ said the professor, ‘we see that this Radium, which seemed at first a fantastic
exception, a mad inversion of all that was most established and fundamental in the
constitution of matter, is really at one with the rest of the elements. It does noticeably and
forcibly what probably all the other elements are doing with an imperceptible slowness. It
is like the single voice crying aloud that betrays the silent breathing multitude in the
darkness. Radium is an element that is breaking up and flying to pieces. But perhaps all
elements are doing that at less perceptible rates. Uranium certainly is; thorium—the stuff
of this incandescent gas mantle—certainly is; actinium. I feel that we are but beginning the
list. And we know now that the atom, that once we thought hard and impenetrable, and
indivisible and final and—lifeless—lifeless, is really a reservoir of immense energy. That is
the most wonderful thing about all this work. A little while ago we thought of the atoms as
we thought of bricks, as solid building material, as substantial matter, as unit masses of
lifeless stuff, and behold! these bricks are boxes, treasure boxes, boxes full of the
intensest force. This little bottle contains about a pint of uranium oxide; that is to say,
about fourteen ounces of the element uranium. It is worth about a pound. And in this
bottle, ladies and gentlemen, in the atoms in this bottle there slumbers at least as much
energy as we could get by burning a hundred and sixty tons of coal. If at a word, in one
instant I could suddenly release that energy here and now it would blow us and everything
about us to fragments; if I could turn it into the machinery that lights this city, it could keep
Edinburgh brightly lit for a week. But at present no man knows, no man has an inkling of
how this little lump of stuff can be made to hasten the release of its store. It does release
it, as a burn trickles. Slowly the uranium changes into radium, the radium changes into a
gas called the radium emanation, and that again to what we call radium A, and so the
process goes on, giving out energy at every stage, until at last we reach the last stage of
all, which is, so far as we can tell at present, lead. But we cannot hasten it.’
‘I take ye, man,’ whispered the chuckle-headed lad, with his red hands tightening like a
vice upon his knee. ‘I take ye, man. Go on! Oh, go on!’
The professor went on after a little pause. ‘Why is the change gradual?’ he asked.
‘Why does only a minute fraction of the radium disintegrate in any particular second?
Why does it dole itself out so slowly and so exactly? Why does not all the uranium
change to radium and all the radium change to the next lowest thing at once? Why this
decay by driblets; why not a decay en masse? . . . Suppose presently we find it is
possible to quicken that decay?’
The chuckle-headed lad nodded rapidly. The wonderful inevitable idea was coming.
He drew his knee up towards his chin and swayed in his seat with excitement. ‘Why not?’
he echoed, ‘why not?’
The professor lifted his forefinger.
‘Given that knowledge,’ he said, ‘mark what we should be able to do! We should not
only be able to use this uranium and thorium; not only should we have a source of power
so potent that a man might carry in his hand the energy to light a city for a year, fight a
fleet of battleships, or drive one of our giant liners across the Atlantic; but we should also
have a clue that would enable us at last to quicken the process of disintegration in all the
other elements, where decay is still so slow as to escape our finest measurements. Every
scrap of solid matter in the world would become an available reservoir of concentrated
force. Do you realise, ladies and gentlemen, what these things would mean for us?’
The scrub head nodded. ‘Oh! go on. Go on.’
‘It would mean a change in human conditions that I can only compare to the discovery
of fire, that first discovery that lifted man above the brute. We stand to-day towards
radio-activity as our ancestor stood towards fire before he had learnt to make it. He
knew it then only as a strange thing utterly beyond his control, a flare on the crest of the
volcano, a red destruction that poured through the forest. So it is that we know radio-
activity to-day. This—this is the dawn of a new day in human living. At the climax of that
civilisation which had its beginning in the hammered flint and the fire-stick of the savage,
just when it is becoming apparent that our ever-increasing needs cannot be borne
indefinitely by our present sources of energy, we discover suddenly the possibility of an
entirely new civilisation. The energy we need for our very existence, and with which
Nature supplies us still so grudgingly, is in reality locked up in inconceivable quantities all
about us. We cannot pick that lock at present, but——’
He paused. His voice sank so that everybody strained a little to hear him.
‘——we will.’
He put up that lean finger again, his solitary gesture.
‘And then,’ he said....
‘Then that perpetual struggle for existence, that perpetual struggle to live on the bare
surplus of Nature’s energies will cease to be the lot of Man. Man will step from the
pinnacle of this civilisation to the beginning of the next. I have no eloquence, ladies and
gentlemen, to express the vision of man’s material destiny that opens out before me. I see
the desert continents transformed, the poles no longer wildernesses of ice, the whole
world once more Eden. I see the power of man reach out among the stars....’
He stopped abruptly with a catching of the breath that many an actor or orator might
have envied.
The lecture was over, the audience hung silent for a few seconds, sighed, became
audible, stirred, fluttered, prepared for dispersal. More light was turned on and what had
been a dim mass of figures became a bright confusion of movement. Some of the people
signalled to friends, some crowded down towards the platform to examine the lecturer’s
apparatus and make notes of his diagrams. But the chuckle-headed lad with the scrub
hair wanted no such detailed frittering away of the thoughts that had inspired him. He
wanted to be alone with them; he elbowed his way out almost fiercely, he made himself as
angular and bony as a cow, fearing lest some one should speak to him, lest some one
should invade his glowing sphere of enthusiasm.
He went through the streets with a rapt face, like a saint who sees visions. He had arms
disproportionately long, and ridiculous big feet.
He must get alone, get somewhere high out of all this crowding of commonness, of
everyday life.
He made his way to the top of Arthur’s Seat, and there he sat for a long time in the
golden evening sunshine, still, except that ever and again he whispered to himself some
precious phrase that had stuck in his mind.
‘If,’ he whispered, ‘if only we could pick that lock....’
The sun was sinking over the distant hills. Already it was shorn of its beams, a globe of
ruddy gold, hanging over the great banks of cloud that would presently engulf it.
‘Eh!’ said the youngster. ‘Eh!’
He seemed to wake up at last out of his entrancement, and the red sun was there
before his eyes. He stared at it, at first without intelligence, and then with a gathering
recognition. Into his mind came a strange echo of that ancestral fancy, that fancy of a
Stone Age savage, dead and scattered bones among the drift two hundred thousand
years ago.
‘Ye auld thing,’ he said—and his eyes were shining, and he made a kind of grabbing
gesture with his hand; ‘ye auld red thing.... We’ll have ye yet.’
CHAPTER THE FIRST
THE NEW SOURCE OF ENERGY
Section I
The problem which was already being mooted by such scientific men as Ramsay,
Rutherford, and Soddy, in the very beginning of the twentieth century, the problem of
inducing radio-activity in the heavier elements and so tapping the internal energy of atoms,
was solved by a wonderful combination of induction, intuition, and luck by Holsten so
soon as the year 1933. From the first detection of radio-activity to its first subjugation to
human purpose measured little more than a quarter of a century. For twenty years after
that, indeed, minor difficulties prevented any striking practical application of his success,
but the essential thing was done, this new boundary in the march of human progress was
crossed, in that year. He set up atomic disintegration in a minute particle of bismuth; it
exploded with great violence into a heavy gas of extreme radio-activity, which
disintegrated in its turn in the course of seven days, and it was only after another year’s
work that he was able to show practically that the last result of this rapid release of
energy was gold. But the thing was done—at the cost of a blistered chest and an injured
finger, and from the moment when the invisible speck of bismuth flashed into riving and
rending energy, Holsten knew that he had opened a way for mankind, however narrow
and dark it might still be, to worlds of limitless power. He recorded as much in the strange
diary biography he left the world, a diary that was up to that particular moment a mass of
speculations and calculations, and which suddenly became for a space an amazingly
minute and human record of sensations and emotions that all humanity might understand.
He gives, in broken phrases and often single words, it is true, but none the less vividly
for that, a record of the twenty-four hours following the demonstration of the correctness
of his intricate tracery of computations and guesses. ‘I thought I should not sleep,’ he
writes—the words he omitted are supplied in brackets—(on account of) ‘pain in (the)
hand and chest and (the) wonder of what I had done.... Slept like a child.’
He felt strange and disconcerted the next morning; he had nothing to do, he was living
alone in apartments in Bloomsbury, and he decided to go up to Hampstead Heath, which
he had known when he was a little boy as a breezy playground. He went up by the
underground tube that was then the recognised means of travel from one part of London
to another, and walked up Heath Street from the tube station to the open heath. He found
it a gully of planks and scaffoldings between the hoardings of house-wreckers. The spirit
of the times had seized upon that narrow, steep, and winding thoroughfare, and was in the
act of making it commodious and interesting, according to the remarkable ideals of Neo-
Georgian æstheticism. Such is the illogical quality of humanity that Holsten, fresh from
work that was like a petard under the seat of current civilisation, saw these changes with
regret. He had come up Heath Street perhaps a thousand times, had known the windows
of all the little shops, spent hours in the vanished cinematograph theatre, and marvelled at
the high-flung early Georgian houses upon the westward bank of that old gully of a
thoroughfare; he felt strange with all these familiar things gone. He escaped at last with a
feeling of relief from this choked alley of trenches and holes and cranes, and emerged
upon the old familiar scene about the White Stone Pond. That, at least, was very much as
it used to be.
There were still the fine old red-brick houses to left and right of him; the reservoir had
been improved by a portico of marble, the white-fronted inn with the clustering flowers
above its portico still stood out at the angle of the ways, and the blue view to Harrow Hill
and Harrow spire, a view of hills and trees and shining waters and wind-driven cloud
shadows, was like the opening of a great window to the ascending Londoner. All that
was very reassuring. There was the same strolling crowd, the same perpetual miracle of
motors dodging through it harmlessly, escaping headlong into the country from the
Sabbatical stuffiness behind and below them. There was a band still, a women’s suffrage
meeting—for the suffrage women had won their way back to the tolerance, a trifle
derisive, of the populace again—socialist orators, politicians, a band, and the same wild
uproar of dogs, frantic with the gladness of their one blessed weekly release from the
back yard and the chain. And away along the road to the Spaniards strolled a vast
multitude, saying, as ever, that the view of London was exceptionally clear that day.
Young Holsten’s face was white. He walked with that uneasy affectation of ease that
marks an overstrained nervous system and an under-exercised body. He hesitated at the
White Stone Pond whether to go to the left of it or the right, and again at the fork of the
roads. He kept shifting his stick in his hand, and every now and then he would get in the
way of people on the footpath or be jostled by them because of the uncertainty of his
movements. He felt, he confesses, ‘inadequate to ordinary existence.’ He seemed to
himself to be something inhuman and mischievous. All the people about him looked fairly
prosperous, fairly happy, fairly well adapted to the lives they had to lead—a week of
work and a Sunday of best clothes and mild promenading—and he had launched
something that would disorganise the entire fabric that held their contentments and
ambitions and satisfactions together. ‘Felt like an imbecile who has presented a box full of
loaded revolvers to a Crêche,’ he notes.
He met a man named Lawson, an old school-fellow, of whom history now knows only
that he was red-faced and had a terrier. He and Holsten walked together and Holsten
was sufficiently pale and jumpy for Lawson to tell him he overworked and needed a...
